Love.
Love weighs a lot.
No one tells you that.
As you grow up,
if you have good parents,
it might take you quite awhile to realize its weight.
Love, at that point,
is an invisible security blanket,
always around you,
always comforting you.
When that is the case,
It isn't until you feel your first heartbreak,
that you understand how much love really weighs,
that you understand how and when and if it is taken from you,
that you might suffocate from trying to breathe the air alone,
like you were stranded on a high mountaintop for the first time
without any oxygen.
You feel betrayed by what you had perceived to be the world,
like a goldfish who took the leap from his bowl,
but ended up flat and dried out,
air all around him,
but with no knowledge or abilities to take it all in.
But unlike the goldfish,
you survive.
Because you have to.
Abandonment and betrayal can destroy any blanket,
leaving you feeling naked and cold.
So, you must find your way back
to that original familial fabric,
the invisible one that was there from the very beginning.
The batting may have diminished over the years,
thinning in spots and clumping in others,
leaving the general texture of the thing a bit lumpy.
But when you hold it to your hot, tear-stained face,
you find that it still retains the power to comfort you,
to restore you to the perfect temperature.
When your face is red, warm, and swollen from the tears,
it wraps your face and cools you.
And it enables you to see
that while one blanket has been shed,
there are indestructible fabrics that still surround you.
As the familial fabric enraptures your face,
you feel a new blanket covering your shoulders.
The blanket is more of a quilt,
filled with shared squares of memories and love
of friends old and new, near and far.
It is there to swaddle you too,
as it had always been,
even when you thought you were all alone.
Those blankets hold you while you are weak.
They pad the fall, cool your fire, and warm your tiny, bleeding heart.
And, eventually, they give you the strength,
the strength you need to build a new blanket of you own,
to wrap around a new lover,
who, one can only hope,
has one to cover you that is as tightly knit as your own.
